The Financial Police (Guardia di Finanza) has seized a huge amount of cocaine in La Spiezia (in the Liguria region of Northern Italy). The drug was hidden behind a false wall in a container from Colombia directed to Genoa via Gioia Tauro, a seaport heavily controlled by the ‘Ndrangheta.

The rise of the Zetas as not just a Mexican menace but as a significant power in the international drug trade has been helped along by its growing links to a sprawling Italian mafia group known as the ‘Ndrangheta

An investigation exposing how Italy’s most ruthless organised crime syndicate has taken over one of the country’s most beautiful cities, killing its citizens and poisoning its water, making massive amounts of money and effectively operating an alternative government.

‘Italy’s Bloodiest Mafia: The Camorra’, documentary by the BBC, on air on the 8th of August on ABC1

CALL FOR PAPERS for the panel “Transnational Crime: Difficulties of Responding to the Evasive Beast” to be presented at 2012 International BISA-ISA conference in Edinburgh 2012. Deadline for the submission of abstracts is August 27, 2011. Abstracts should be sent to: yuliya.zabyelina@sis.unitn.it

Transnational Crime: Difficulties of Responding to the Evasive Beast.

The ways in which transnational crime and its countermeasures confront the traditional borders of crime control, national security, national politics and international relations have challenge the disciplinary boundaries of orthodox criminology, which has traditionally focused on matters internal to nation-states. This panel invites proposals that investigate challenges of responding to transnational criminal activities:

– THEORETICAL: alternative theoretical approach to understanding both the phenomena currently labeled transnational crime and state responses to them; orthodox and critical ways of labeling and responding to transnational activities. State institutional challenges of responding to transnational crime; world risk society.

– SECURITY: merging national security and police threats; national and “a-national” sites of law enforcement; transnational policing; balancing the paradoxical intersection of neo-liberal globalization and “tough” security policies; a “panopticon” state against crime; evaluating the private security market.

– SOCIAL: strategies of border management in terms of fighting illicit cross-border movements; border politics and border reconstruction; crime and social injuries: the problem of “illegalized” migrants and “criminalized” victims of human trafficking; established social divisions based on race, class, and gender by maintaining and extending countermeasures; “gated” communities.